A few race officials worked against the wind to inflate a bright orange start- and finish-line arch, anchoring it down with dumbbells. Others poured cups of Gatorade and stacked bananas while a DJ blasted rap and hip-hop tunes.

In many ways, the race organized by non-profit Chicago Run last month was like the countless others that take place in the city each spring.

The course, however, didn’t wind along the scenic Lakefront Trail or through city or neighborhood streets. The entire 3K took place inside the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center (JTDC), one of the country’s largest youth facilities.

It was the culmination of a six-week program at the facility—an innovative effort to improve young detainees’ health and support their mental wellbeing. Besides the stress relief and the feel-good surge of endorphins, completing the program and the race offers a deeper reward.

“You can see that transition that when a kid's accomplished something, what that does for them,” said Leonard Dixon, the facility’s superintendent.

As the temperature rose on a stunningly bright day, the young runners completed 10 laps around three adjacent cement prison yards.

“When they said they were going to open up all the yards—from in the building, it looked easy,” one of the runners, 18-year-old L.T.,* told Runner’s World. “But once you get to doing it, you run around to the other side and all the sides … you’re only on the first lap, and you’re like, aw, man.”

By halfway through, L.T., who lives in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood, felt tired. But encouragement from the guards, attorneys, and other staff members in attendance buoyed him. “Every time I finish another lap, I just see everybody saying, go go go!” he said.

So, he kept it up, finishing strong in 17:50. It’s not every day, he noted, that inmates attract their own cheering squads.

Bringing a Running Program to a New Venue

The JTDC houses about 200 children and teens awaiting trial. Throughout the six-week running program, staff and volunteers from Chicago Run cleared security checkpoints three times a week for practice. At each session, about 25 to 30 youth participants do dynamic warmups, running and circuit workouts, and team-building activities, said program director Crystal Lein.

It’s similar to the youth programming Chicago Run offers more than 18,000 children and youth at 60 sites throughout the city. Most are students in Chicago public schools. All are based on an approach called trauma-informed coaching, said program manager Ryan Greguske.

The philosophy acknowledges childhood adversity and its influence on actions and responses. Rather than correcting or yelling, coaches aim to change behavior through developing relationships and offering positive reinforcement, he said.

In the fall of 2017, the JTDC’s medical director at the time—Ngozi Ezike, M.D., who was named director of the Illinois Department of Public Health earlier this year—approached Chicago Run about bringing these techniques to detained youth.

The collaboration represented a logical extension for Chicago Run. Although the organization began a decade ago largely in response to inequities in physical activity and rates of childhood obesity, it has evolved to teach things like socioemotional learning, conflict mediation, and building self-efficacy through running, according to Danya Rosen, who started as executive director in January.

Chicago Run conducted joint training sessions with the JTDC recreational center staff, then launched a pilot session in April 2018. The positive feedback led to a second six-week session in the fall and then the third, which ran from April through mid-May.

Administering the program in a detention-center setting required some shifts from Chicago Run’s typical school-based programs. First, there’s the temporary nature. The average length of stay at JTDC is 19 days. “We meet a kid one day and then they end up getting released the next day. And neither them nor us knew that it was going to happen,” program director Lein said.

Each day’s schedule is also unpredictable, requiring flexibility. This session, practice was scheduled to start at 3:00, but might be delayed if an incident kept the facility on lockdown or a resident headcount took longer than planned. Chicago Run coaches added an extra half-hour to their time slot to account for potential delays and learned to adjusted their training sessions when time was tight.

Then, there was the equipment. The facility’s standard-issue footwear couldn’t hold up to much activity; some runners literally wore though their soles. So Chicago Run secured donations from Nike as well as private donors to provide compression socks and shoes, Greguske said. Residents check them in and out before practice and the race. When they leave the facility, the new sneakers go home with the rest of their personal belongings.

What Vulnerable Kids Can Learn From Lacing Up

The program offers plenty of physical benefits for kids who spend a lot of time indoors. They’re guaranteed an hour of physical activity per day, either in the yard (like the running program) or in an indoor gym, where they might do yoga or dance. But otherwise, they’re in school or elsewhere inside the facility.

“Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, we come out here, exercise, stretch. It relieves us; we get to feel the air,” L.T. said. He ran with the group during the second session, not long after arriving at JTDC, and liked it so much he returned and recruited other residents to join him.

On days they run, “you sleep better than a regular day of sleep,” he said.

Though sleep is critical for developing bodies and minds, insomnia is a common complaint among those in correctional facilities; in a recent study in the Journal of Correctional Health Care, one in five juvenile detainees reported it. In an informal survey Ezike conducted after a previous session of the running program, about nine out of 10 participants reported better rest, Greguske said.

Of course, the effects last far longer than an evening. “A lot of times our kids have not had the ability of just having completed tasks,” Dixon said. Learning the discipline required to train for and finish a race instills a critical sense of capability. “They feel good about themselves. Some of the other negative things are pushed to the side.”

How Running Can Give a Second Chance

At the end of the program, each runner receives a certificate. Many send copies home and to their legal team. Patricia Mendoza—associate judge at the Circuit Court of Cook County—said from her vantage point on the bench, she’ll often see youth nudge their attorneys, encouraging them to present this badge of honor in court.

When they do, she always congratulates them and asks for a copy. Mendoza understands the work required—she completed the Chicago Marathon in 2002, and has since taken part in a running program in which she trained to complete a 5K alongside youth on probation.

Watching their progress, and how excited they were by small things like medals and postrace treats, caused a profound shift for her. “Because of their backgrounds and the things that they’ve been caught up in, you sometimes forget that at the end of the day they’re kids,” she said. “It’s so easy to define them just by their charges … but this gave me a different perspective.”

Mendoza and other judges in the juvenile system have more leeway in sentencing than do those presiding over adult cases. She can—and does—take those certificates into account when making decisions. “If there was a crime, but they’ve done a fair amount of time here and they’ve proven that they’re able to turn it around,” she said, “you’re more likely to give them a chance and say, ‘Okay, let’s do probation.’”

Broad research suggests programs like this have benefits; in one study, youth who’d been through trauma had a lower risk of developing mental illness later in life if they participated in sports. Eventually, Chicago Run hopes to collect more formal data on this program specifically, Greguske said, potentially testing things like residents’ levels of the stress hormone cortisol.

But Dixon said he’s already convinced of the good it’s doing. Once-distant residents now give him hugs; others proudly show off their running shoes and certificates. “Some things are just right and I don’t need research to tell me what's right—it’s just what it is,” he said.

The fact that these juveniles see adults in the community invest in them, even if they’ve made a bad decision or two along the way, can make a difference in their future trajectory, he said. “We may have them for a short period of time, but just to sometimes turn on the light is a good thing.”

*JTDC officials provided only initials to protect the resident’s identity.

Cindy KuzmaContributing WriterCindy is a freelance health and fitness writer, author, and podcaster who’s contributed regularly to Runner’s World since 2013.

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